C30, C60, C90 ...Gone? The Rise and Fall of the Compact Cassette

When the inexorable rise of the Compact Disk finally lifted the stylus on the vinyl records market toward the end of the 20th Century, record collectors let loose a collective howl of anguish.

The slow decline of the Compact Audio Cassette has evoked a more muted response, and yet we shouldn't forget the impact tapes have had on music culture.True, tapes never really supplanted vinyl in music lovers' affections.

The lush artwork that graced a 12" album cover was diminished when shrunk to cassette size, while a Hawkwind vinyl gatefold sleeve, say, made a better surface for rolling joints.

Cassettes never sounded as good as vinyl, occasional pop and crackle preferable to muffled high-end and tape hiss. You couldn't skip to a preferred song with the ease of picking up and dropping the needle. And cassettes were shockingly vulnerable, to heat, moisture and magnets, the spools of tape often chewed up in the gears of a malfunctioning cassette deck.

Tape's USP was that it was portable, and you could record on it, freeing car stereos from the tyranny of the radio DJ, and enabling consumers to duplicate their record collection--or, indeed, a friend's record collection, thus unwittingly initiating the death of the Record Industry.

Manufacturers cannily fetishised such acts of piracy, marketing a myriad variety of cassettes, in black, coloured or transparent plastic, daubed with logos and decals and bewildering-but-impressive techno mumbo-jumbo like ‘HIGH BIAS', ‘EPITAXIAL' and ‘ANTI-RESONANCE CONSTRUCTION'.

If you were serious about your taping, you always bought Chrome or Metal cassettes, never employed "High-Speed Dubbing," and never ever used C120s, which were prone to stretching.

Home Taping Was Killing Music, the Record Industry claimed, but the opposite was true. The increased portability of cassette recorders aided the efforts of the bootleggers who, in the 1970s, risked a roughing-up by Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant if caught taping the Zep. Many now, however, are grateful for the bootleggers' illicit activities, and the archives of demos and live performances they have furtively preserved.

Home Taping was, in fact, democratizing the Record Industry. Affordable 4-track cassette recorders turned every musician's bedroom into a studio, Lo-Fi pioneers Robert Pollard and Lou Barlow waxing rhapsodic over 4-track's warm, fuzzy sound. Tape-to-tape recorders served as pressing plants for a cottage industry of DIY cassette-only labels, selling via mail order or West London's Rough Trade shop. Subterranean genres like industrial, grindcore and lo-fi flourished in this hermetic, anarchic market, while DJ-produced mix-tapes have long been a staple of Hip Hop culture.

The home-made mix-tape was, however, the cassette's most endearing and enduring gift to Pop. The mix-tape turned us all into radio programmers, forcing our favourite songs upon our friends via painstakingly compiled and decorated cassettes that celebrated our uniquely wonderful taste in music, or expressed our feelings via the medium of other peoples' songs. CD-Rs sound "better," perhaps, but an actual mix-tape--where the compiler has had to sit and listen to every song as they taped it for you--offers a wholly more intimate experience than simply clicking and dragging some mp3s in iTunes.

The cassette tape finally ran afoul of the capstans and cogs of fate with the arrival of affordable CD Walkmans and domestic CD-R hardware, its USP not quite so Unique anymore. Some cassette-only labels survive, esoteric operations like Noise label American Tapes, whose releases come encased in squashed paint-cans and found-art sculptures.Mostly, though, tapes are relics of a past age adorning hip twentysomethings' apparel and accessories, fetishised with a mixture of irony and nostalgia, as Generation Xers eulogized the 8 Track Cartridge a decade before them. Consider it a most pop-cultural form of immortality.

Velvety Soft - John Cale - The Influences of

John Davies Cale (born March 9, 1942), better known as John Cale, is a Welsh musician, composer, singer-songwriter and record producer best known as a founding member of the rock & roll band The Velvet Underground.
Though most well-noted for his work in rock music, Cale has worked in a variety of styles and genres, including drone, noise and classical. Since departing from The Velvet Underground, he has released approximately 30 albums.

Of his solo work, Cale is perhaps best known for his album Paris 1919, plus his mid-1970s Island Records trilogy of albums: Fear, Slow Dazzle, and Helen of Troy.

Over the course of his career, John Cale has produced and/or collaborated with notable artists John Cage, Nico, Lou Reed, Nick Drake, Brian Eno, Kevin Ayers, Patti Smith, The Stooges, and Squeeze.

A Life in Bands Part 1

The 80's and "The Cure".

Picking members is a common practice in bands. Do you pick a member who has good set-skills? Would you go for "taste"? How about if they have their own equipment? Or just one of your friends who can't even play? Your guess is as good as mine. What? The last one? You're damn right! I've been in bands all my life and this is the usual rule of thumb. My first oficial band was in college it was 1989. My high school band didn't even take off but we did plan it but we ain't got our own equipment. Are two keyboards considered a band? In the 80's it was. I was never a fan of "new wave" when it hit the country. It was all a fad. Undercut hair, ambell jeans, Tretorn tennis shoes etc. etc. But at that time I was already listening to European rock and pop. (Communards, Arcadia, Frankie Goes to Hollywood). "RELAX" was a huge hit overseas but nobody listened to it in here. Good for me. Thompson Twins too. (No thanks to Adam Sandler for reviving their song). Howard Jones was my favorite piano player and even Joe Jackson. Everything changed when I got my first guitar and played my first song. Officially, "Boys Don't Cry" by The Cure is the first song I played but since it's with my on and off band I couldn't claim it. "I Melt With You by Modern English" was the next. There was dissension in the band since there was an unofficial band leader since we can only play what he can play. The song lineup got crappier and crappier. Well, I hated "The Dawn" at that time and all the "new wave" local bands. I tried to veer them to play "Gang of Four" and "The Clash" tunes for a one time only gig but was rejected by the "best friend of the band leader". "FUCK YOU, JOEL!!" FUCK YOU TOO, JAIME!! (Finally! That made me feel better!). Well they finally kicked me out. Good riddance. They play cover too much and they want to play in a bar (at that time, think bon jovi, scorpions ummmm deep purple songs.) To erase this from my memory I try to dig deeper to the 80's. The 80's were a blur. All i can remember was there aint no cable yet and my musical taste are dictated by a newly created MTV (Talking Heads, Thomas Dolby etc.) And "Thriller" was every where. The most hated song in the planet. Live Aid, Wembley was shown on TV. Good things did outweigh the bad in the 80's. Pros: Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Bronski Beat, Talking Heads, siouxie and the Banshees etc etc.. Cons: Bagets....fuck, never mind.

The Death Metal Years...and a bit of the 90's

The opening riff of "Master or Puppets" still rings an my ears. So soes the yowl of "Tom Araya" in "Angel of Death". It doesn't help that I got good at playing bass that I jammed those tunes with the "B-Balic Collective". Throw in Pantera's "Walk" and Helmet for good measure and we a have an intense "Metal" line-up. Well, metal really does include the lifestyle. It doesn't make sense that you dress in adidas kicks and clean trousers and play "Am I Evil". And the music dos work when you're loaded with "86 proof" fuel. And thnks to a motorcycle crash, I got uglier (as if I'm not already!)and that increased my metal cred. Ah, yes the metal years. It was like spontaneous combustion but as the fire got wayward it ran out of fuel. The "90's" are starting and most kids are starting a band and like most magazines say (no internet yet, kids) Nirvana killed Heavy Metal. You don't to learn scales or the blues to be a guitarist. Kurt Cobain even made to the list of guitarist in Rolling Stone Magazine. Ahead of Stevie Ray, Luke, Malmsteen, Gilbert or even Thayil. And this is where fashion over music started to creep in. ( I never wore a Dr. Marten boot). But I must admit I wore combat boots. (I'm a big "Clash" fan). So the band revolution wore on....and where was I? Well, the metal band crashed and burned. The guitar player went to play where he will get paid, (Japan!). And I'm stuck with players who just brag but got no balls to play. Do you eventually back down from the demands of the majority and play what they like? For a while, yes. But after a while fuck, no! The answer is create your own genre if rock, pop, or even metal disowns you. This is where my musical palates got even stranger, deeper or even weirder.....No not the Eraserheads, Jesus! Well, the respect for them would grow soon.....not! My mind was not here when the band thing in the 90's broke through. I didn't own an E-heads tape, or any thing local because they're all corny. And they rip off English bands' melody. And good lord, they only found out about it recently.

To be Concluded...

Surreal Sounds Pt 2 (The Death of Radio and MTV)

AKSAK MABOUL Onze danses pour combattre la migraine(1977)

In the spring of 1977, two young Belgian musicians who call themselves Aksak Maboul (aka Marc Hollander & Vincent Kenis) set out to record an album, Onze danses pour combattre la migraine, in which they playfully fused and deconstructed all kinds of genres to create their own musical world. Three years later, Hollander founded the Crammed label. Many ingredients came in and out of the Aksak blender : fake jazz, electronics, imaginary African & Balkan music, minimalism... there were even pre-techno aspects such in as Saure Gurke and its characteristic keyboard stab pattern which will mysteriously find its way into many classic Detroit techno tracks some ten years later. Onze Danses became a cult album, and seems retrospectively to have mapped out the way for the various directions which have been explored during the next two decades.

Surreal Sounds

Delirious yet sophisticated, lush yet furious, sarcastic yet sentimental, FLAT EARTH SOCIETY are one of the most exciting big bands around.
FLAT EARTH SOCIETY is the brainchild of mercurial Belgian composer & clarinet player Peter Vermeersch, and consists of about 14 top-class turbulent and skilled musicians.
What is this insane music ? Rock, classical avant-garde, cha-cha-cha, punk jazz or cartoon soundtracks ? Or a bit of all of these ? Let's hand it over to the media:
"A band capable of everything from beautiful chamber jazz miniatures to slinky crime-theme jazz noir to driving rock rhythms. The songs are all very approachable, but there's plenty of punch in the playing and soloing and great detailed arrangements." (Allmusic.com)
"An unruly confluence of Carl Stalling's "Merrie Melodies", Henry Mancini's cosmopolitan swank, and Sun Ra's cosmic slop-- all performed with the whiplash attention span of John Zorn's Naked City. (They) draw as much inspiration from such 20th century composers as Stravinsky or Bartok (not to mention art-rockers like Zappa or Beefheart) as they do from the blues or other more traditional American sources. You'll be enthralled by (their) seemingly bottomless creativity." (Pitchforkmedia)
"Far removed from the historicized big-band sounds one mostly hears these days in the United States… fresh, inventive and witty." (The New York Times)
Are we starting to get the picture ?…

* Peter Vermeersch has composed music for numerous pieces by major choreographers Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Wim Vandekeybus. He's written for opera, theatre, ballet, was a founding member of bands such as Maximalist! and X-Legged Sally, wrote pieces for the Arditti Quartet, Quadro Quartet, the Smith Quartet and Ensemble Musique Nouvelle, played with Union, Fred Frith, Jazzwork from Berlin, The Simpletones, produced recordings by dEUS and Guy Chadwick.
◊ The band currently includes Tuxedomoon trumpet player Luc van Lieshout, ex-Think Of One member Bart Maris (three other Think Of One members used to be part of FES), keyboardist Peter Vandenberghe, bassist Kristof Roseeuw, trombone players Marc Meeuwissen and Stefaan Blancke, Berlinde Deman on tuba, Teun Verbruggen on drums, Tom Wouters, Michel Mast, Bruno Vansina & Benjamin Boutreur on woodwinds, occasional singer/guitarist Roland Vancampenhout, and film actor/accordion player/vocalist Wim Willaert, who starred in the multi-awarded French feature film "Quand la mer monte/When The Tide Comes In".

Sesame Street: NOT The Same Street

Sesame Street: NOT the same street

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia! Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time.
The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “

The chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.
Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.
The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of

“Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.
People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs.

Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.

REMOTE CONTROL

"A British film about the life and death of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, starring a first-time actor, has earned a rapturous reception in Cannes."
- BBC

The BBC is indeed one of the most credible source of information in the free world. (for now) It seems the movie itself is a triumph of sorts since the band kept its anonimity for so long that it's fitting that they finally get the recognition they are getting. And the penny drops. Getting the recognition from the MTV is not the recognition the band truly deserves. I guess the band should just take the money and run since money has a big mouth these days. Well, gone are the days of Van Gogh where artist go on with their works uncompromised. The bloke never heard the word "royalties". The cover of an MTV band (name witheld, because I f*ckin' hate the band) of a song they first played in Granada didn't help (I find bands doing covers an abomination). Perhaps covering a song live is forgivable but relaeasing it, well that's another story. Giving stupid fans amunition for saying the remake is much better than the original is outright blasphemy. Well, thank God for Factory records for keeping the masters. Or else Ian would hang himself again for hearing what MTV had done to his music. Oh, the movie was good.

Prime Directive

The new Star Trek will be out soon. I have reservations on it because in our minds William Shatner is Captain James T. Kirk and no actor comes close. They can try.